Mobile communication and computing devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, e-readers, laptops, and personal digital assistants, have proliferated and penetrated human civilization at dizzying speed. Today, substantially all cultures, spanning the gamut from technologically unsophisticated societies to societies at the cutting edge of today's science and technology, are intimately familiar with mobile communication/computing equipment. In the year 2013 alone, about 1.8 billion mobile phones, of which 1 billion mobile phones were smartphones, were shipped to consumers by manufacturers—an astonishing, approximately 2 mobile phones for every man, woman, and child on the planet. In the same year, an additional 500 million tablets and laptops were sold. And communication/computing devices, hereinafter generically referred to as computers, are fast morphing into a plethora of different forms that make them easier to use and carry, and even more intimately part of everyday life. Computers are being configured as wearable accessories such as glasses, watches and armbands, and are being integrated into clothing.
The ubiquity of computers in all their new and various forms, and their associated accessories and mobile applications, “Apps”, and the increase in world population and resultant density have eroded personal and collective privacy to a degree that maintaining and protecting a modicum of quiet, privacy, and confidentiality, has become a nagging, headline making worry. For example, inadvertent visual eavesdropping of a laptop, tablet, wrist or hand computer screen by a crowded neighbor in a subway, on a bus, in an airplane or shopping mall is an often frequent breach of a person's personal zone of privacy that if at all possible, may require substantial dexterous fidgeting to avoid.